A better question:
Did the peer review process
ever work correctly?
Roughly half of scientific
experiment results can NOT
be replicated by other
scientists.
That strongly suggests
that the current
peer review process
is NOT working well.
The climate change
peer review process
is really like a
"pal review process" !
There are no
defined standards
for peer reviews !
If a science paper
is well written,
so the reviewers
can understand it,
and the paper
does NOT contradict
the consensus
in the field,
then getting
it published
is not difficult.
Reviewers will
typically suggest
superficial changes,
using a process
that does take
a lot of time.
Most scientists
are good at getting
their papers published,
because their jobs and
career advancement,
depend on it.
Press releases for
the mainstream media
are often used
to get extra attention
for published papers --
but releases tend to be
very misleading
or exaggerated.
Peer review was "invented"
in the 1950s, and tends to be
a "rubber stamp".
But there is
no "rubber stamp"
if a scientific paper
challenges a
widely held tenet
of the leaders of the field,
or presents too many
negative results
( negative results increase doubts
about the need for continued funding
of the field ).
Published scientific literature
has a very strong positive bias.
The old days
of individual researchers,
paid by universities
to do teaching and research,
with little or no monitoring,
are over.
Professors get paid big bucks
by bringing in lots of "soft money"
to pay administrative “overhead”.
Many scientific issues
require large teams
of people, using massive
computing resources,
to run complex models.
Perhaps the only way
to get unbiased science,
would be to have
independent outsiders,
or retired scientists,
doing quality checking,
in return for a fee?